Open Source or spontaneous frantic karma yoga on a planetary level. Altruism and dignity

Open Source is an elite spiritual human phenomenon in which people spontaneously sign up, without approvals and without resentment, giving humanity the miracle of their ideas and work.

Lately, programs with free source (open source) appear more and more often, and the term is thrown left and right between big companies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

But in the end, what is open source?

An open source program is a program that is desaunted by the community, a company or even a person. In practice the program is offered under a license of free use, which guarantees access to the source code.

Basically, there are 4 freedoms that are guaranteed under an open source program:

• can be used for any purpose
• how it works can be studied and adapted to its own needs
• can be redistributed, to help other people
• can be improved and placed at the public’s mercy for the benefit of the whole society

When and where?

Although the concept is present since the early days of computers, this is formalized in 1998, it caught a lot before in the 1990s, with the appearance of the first operating systems oriented to home users.

Among the first promoters of the open source movement is Eric Raymond, OSI founder Richard Stallman, MIT researcher, Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system.

Linux

Perhaps some of you have heard at least in the past of Linux, the operating system that currently supports modern infrastructure. It consists entirely of open source programs, created and fully maintained by the community, Linux continues to remain an example and a pillar of community support of what open source means. Written by the community, for the community, and why not, for the whole society.

Linux first made its appearance in 1991, when a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds published the first prototype on an online forum, with description of a project started more as a hobby, without too high expectations. Fortunately, the idea caught on to the forum audience, so in 1994 the first full version of Linux is released.

With this, organizations like NASA are beginning to replace the existing infrastructure, quite expensive at the time, with entire farms of cheap computers running Linux.

Easy, the entire industry begins to make the transition to Linux, appreciated for its low system requirements, as well as for the open-source license.

Today, Linux is used throughout the industry and all types of equipment, from integrated systems on motherboards to almost all super-computers.

Another big step in the open source direction, synonymous with online freedom, was Android OS, owned by Google, the operating system that runs on the vast majority of current phones.

Open source currently

Today, the situation is more expansive than ever. There are huge networks dedicated entirely to open source operations, such as GitHub, a hosting service for code development projects, which large companies as well as people of all kinds and preparations keep projects open to everyone.

This is due to the creation of “git”, a versioning system, written by Linus Torvalds, frustrated by existing solutions, which were either predilection for errors or had too long a conflict resolution time, so in 2005, after many volunteer programmers gave up BitKeeper, the closed-source versioning system used then, Linus started writing his own system.

Some established projects present on Github are:

• Linux, climbed by “community” open source
• React, uploaded by Facebook, is a library for interface sites
• Angular, climbed by Google, is a library for interface sites
• Spark, climbed by Apache, is the engine of large-scale analysis
• Visual Studio Code, uploaded by Microsoft, is one of the most popular text editors

There are currently around 96 million projects and over 200 million voluntary code changes on GitHub, with anyone able to create their own hub where people can contribute further where they consider 🙂

Why does it matter?

The value of these programs starts from what they propose, namely to create software for people, with a high social value, without pursuing benefits or obtaining profit by degrading intellectual freedom. From the very beginning, the whole concept was designed for society, which is why today projects like this number tens of thousands of contributors each, who, in a disinterested and detached way, help, maintain and expand hundreds of projects, starting from Linux, created entirely by the community, to projects started by mega-corporations, issued and climbed on GitHub under open source license , with thousands of people contributing, without a direct financial profit.

Surely, this current is vital to today’s society.